I mean the release of a new search engine is hardly news. And the tenous link to employee rights is just that...tenous. My employer can come to my PC and do windows->start->search any time they want. They can do it remotely using VNC. They can mount my local disk and do it remotely anyway. There's nothing new here except someone deliberately trying to put spin on an innocuous story to gain publicity.
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I think you refute your own argument. If black holes "devour all light [information] that crosses the event horizon" (and that's certainly not a universally accepted definition - see the article in Scientific American, April 1997) then you can prove the existence of a black hole by finding a region of space which appears to devour all light. Trivial. Maybe I misunderstand you and you're making a deeper point. If so, please explain.
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His argument also seems to suggest that there is one single answer for "how to spend money for the blind". Blind people are people like anyone else. If they want to buy this book they will and there'll be lots of reprints. If they don't it will be dropped. What does it have to do with him?
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...has been discovered in the movements of the Sun.
Dr. Smith at Berkeley U., CA explains "We've noticed that the Sun's motion appears to have a large periodic component. Typically we see it rise in the morning and set in the evening. But the truly amazing thing is that it seems to do this once per day. Exactly."
Dr. Jones at Brigham Young U. is more sceptical "I've looked at Smith's data and see no evidence of a periodic pattern. I've been tracking sunrises now for the last year and the rising of the sun has fluctuated back and forth by several hours over this time. If the Sun's motion were truly periodic don't you think it would rise at the same time every morning?"
Still, Smith's team are unperturbed. "There's a definite pattern here although it might not be as simple as we thought".
Smith also rules out the possibility that intelleigence may be invokved in the patterning. Jones, on the other hand, wasn't so quick to dismiss such a hypothesis...
It looks like obtaining true-colour images can be a tricky process involving multiple exposures using different filters. It would be interesting to know exactly how many steps the space photos we see go through before we reach us. We have to take a lot on trust!
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Is it ethical for parents to have children 'naturally'? Surely they deprive potential adoptees of adoption. If not, then why is it different from factory line babies in the sense you raise?
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That crap about viruses is just that - crap. And if you don't want to open up your PC get a USB or Firewire enclosure for your drive. I bought one for $70. I can take my drive anywhere I want and plug it into any Windoze PC whenever I want. Never caught a virus off it once and it cost half what the equivalent Iomega product costs.
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Photons fired one at a time eventually produce exactly the same interference patterns as light beams. The probability distribution of the arrival point of each photon in the two slit experiment is different to the sum of that from two individual slits.
Please. Did your school not offer physics?
I have a PhD myself. What about you? Sounds like you didn't understand what you learnt at high school. This is a crappy retort but hey - you started the crappy ad hominem attack because you're clearly too ignorant to respond in terms of physics.
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The arbitrary decision that a man is an observer but a cat is not is equally stupid and nonsensicle (sic).
Where did you get that idea about humans and cats from? Few modern physicists think that there is anything special about humans that makes them 'observers' but that cats aren't. Do you have any reference to a book that makes this claim or are you making this stuff up yourself?
All they have are equations that seem to work. Interpreting them is another matter
Tell me - what does 'interpretation' add that the equations don't provide?
the very concept that not being able to measure something means it "doesn't have a value" is so ridiculous as to be laughable
Where is the crest of a wave after the wave has broken on the shore? What is its speed?
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I might be oversimplifying, but I think Heisenburg meant that an electron could be anywhere, not is everywhere
Unless they're historians as well no physicist could care less what Heisenberg originally meant. It's completely irrelevant to the practice of doing physics today.
Percentages are nice, but Joe want's to know! So what does Joe do? He declared to the world that his cat is 50% dead.
This is a completely incorrect picture. Joe tried damn hard to work with a probabilistic view of things for many decades. But you know what? - it didn't work. Joe didn't decide the cat was half dead because he had to know - he decided it because if the cat had a 50% chance of being dead it would behave completely differently to what is observed. Physicists aren't terribly afraid of probability (notwithstanding some comments to the contrary by Einstein). But probability theory failed. Simple experiments that can be repeated easily simply can't be explained by probability theory. And if you examine some books on physics you'll find that physicists are still using probability theory to describe plenty of physics - just not the parts that are better explained using superpositions of states.
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Re:What's attractive about a palmtop?
on
Palm In Trouble?
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· Score: 2
I can play Sim City while having a shit. I can read a newspaper using only one hand while waiting for groceries. I can experiment with code while sitting in economy on a plane. I can discreetly write an email while sitting in a meeting. Maybe you don't shit or shop?
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Palmtop computers are almost completely unnecessary (though desirable) pieces of consumer electronics
Frankly I think it's the height of arrogance to come out with a statement like this. There are millions of users of PDAs in this world. They have different lifestyles, jobs, budgets and interests. How have you managed to determine that these things are useless? Uslessness is a function of two arguments - the item in question and the person to whom it is useful. Unless you take into account the person you cannot make claims about the usefulness of the item. You can speak for yourself of course...but that's hardly interesting.
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Well let me see if I can make you worry even more.
Every day billions of organisms reproduce sexually resulting in the birth of organisms whose genomes are random shufflings of their parents' genomes. Who knows what new organisms may appear at any moment?
Even worse - viruses transfer genomic material between different organisms so that without human interference genes can move between species. Even between humans and other animals.
Worrying yet?
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Re:Don't extrapolate from PDI/Dreamworks
on
Linux and Shrek
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· Score: 2
The fact that they were able to so easily port their 20 years of code to Linux should be a testimony to how corporations can better use Linux
I beg to differ. They were only able to do this because they have an almost 100% in-house code base. In house animation software. In house rendering software. In house compositing software. In house lighting software. In house version control. (But off the shelf modelling software I think.) This isn't the case even for companies like ILM that have a long tradition of developing their own code. PDI has always been perceived by people in the industry as different to other visual effects companies because of this. The fact that they were able to port stuff to Linux isn't a testimony to Linux - it's a testimony to the very long term vision that the PDI R&D group have in keeping code in house. PDI were up and running with Linux well before anyone else because their situtaion was so exceptional.
And they do pay a considerable price for doing everything in-house.
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Don't extrapolate from PDI/Dreamworks
on
Linux and Shrek
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· Score: 2
PDI are an unusual post-production company and you definitely cannot draw conclusions about the high end graphics world from their example. They have a very talented R&D group who have developed in-house graphics code from day 1. This means that they are in a very strong position to use whatever OS they want because they have the source. They use some off the shelf software but not as much as other companies.
Other visual effects companies such as ILM and Sony Imageworks use much more off the shelf software so for them to make the transition to Linux is much harder (although they are trying to). Many visual effects companies are happily using Windows - especially the smaller companies that have very little custom software or whose software is generally in the form of plugins rather than entire applications.
Let us spread this failing of science everywhere, so that we can regain our childhood sense of wonder and expose the necessary failing of science.
A failure to explain a phenomenon isn't a failure of science. It's the opposite. It's what every scientist dreams of. Finding a disagreement between observed reality and theory is what the most exciting science is about.
I'm not sure what planet you're on because you seem to be trying to write an anti-science diatribe and yet much of what you say is no different from the view of a scientist.
But when people ask why there is more matter than anti-matter and the respose is that anti-matter decays faster it's practically a circular answer like explaining that morphine works because it contains soporific agents. Almost everyone's immediate question is "Well why does it decay faster?" and to that there is as yet no reasonable answer. This is an interesting result for physicists but it really does nothing to answer the deep questions posed by either the Slashdot article or the BBC article.
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Slashdot Mirror
I mean the release of a new search engine is hardly news. And the tenous link to employee rights is just that...tenous. My employer can come to my PC and do windows->start->search any time they want. They can do it remotely using VNC. They can mount my local disk and do it remotely anyway. There's nothing new here except someone deliberately trying to put spin on an innocuous story to gain publicity.
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Yo? Ho? After a bottle of rum who's checking?
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I think you refute your own argument. If black holes "devour all light [information] that crosses the event horizon" (and that's certainly not a universally accepted definition - see the article in Scientific American, April 1997) then you can prove the existence of a black hole by finding a region of space which appears to devour all light. Trivial. Maybe I misunderstand you and you're making a deeper point. If so, please explain.
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Check out the original images that went into this composite here here
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and a bottle of rum.
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...and put a bogus interview between you and some purveyor of 'eternal life rings'. It's a bit embarassing.
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Don't call me Danny. Whatever you do - don't call me Danny. I go funny when people call me Danny. Just don't do it - OK?
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His argument also seems to suggest that there is one single answer for "how to spend money for the blind". Blind people are people like anyone else. If they want to buy this book they will and there'll be lots of reprints. If they don't it will be dropped. What does it have to do with him?
--
Dr. Smith at Berkeley U., CA explains "We've noticed that the Sun's motion appears to have a large periodic component. Typically we see it rise in the morning and set in the evening. But the truly amazing thing is that it seems to do this once per day. Exactly."
Dr. Jones at Brigham Young U. is more sceptical "I've looked at Smith's data and see no evidence of a periodic pattern. I've been tracking sunrises now for the last year and the rising of the sun has fluctuated back and forth by several hours over this time. If the Sun's motion were truly periodic don't you think it would rise at the same time every morning?"
Still, Smith's team are unperturbed. "There's a definite pattern here although it might not be as simple as we thought".
Smith also rules out the possibility that intelleigence may be invokved in the patterning. Jones, on the other hand, wasn't so quick to dismiss such a hypothesis...
--It looks like obtaining true-colour images can be a tricky process involving multiple exposures using different filters. It would be interesting to know exactly how many steps the space photos we see go through before we reach us. We have to take a lot on trust!
--
Anyway, more info and a 2K (!!!) res image here
--Is it ethical for parents to have children 'naturally'? Surely they deprive potential adoptees of adoption. If not, then why is it different from factory line babies in the sense you raise?
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That crap about viruses is just that - crap. And if you don't want to open up your PC get a USB or Firewire enclosure for your drive. I bought one for $70. I can take my drive anywhere I want and plug it into any Windoze PC whenever I want. Never caught a virus off it once and it cost half what the equivalent Iomega product costs.
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I can play Sim City while having a shit. I can read a newspaper using only one hand while waiting for groceries. I can experiment with code while sitting in economy on a plane. I can discreetly write an email while sitting in a meeting. Maybe you don't shit or shop?
--
--
Every day billions of organisms reproduce sexually resulting in the birth of organisms whose genomes are random shufflings of their parents' genomes. Who knows what new organisms may appear at any moment?
Even worse - viruses transfer genomic material between different organisms so that without human interference genes can move between species. Even between humans and other animals.
Worrying yet?
--And they do pay a considerable price for doing everything in-house.
--Other visual effects companies such as ILM and Sony Imageworks use much more off the shelf software so for them to make the transition to Linux is much harder (although they are trying to). Many visual effects companies are happily using Windows - especially the smaller companies that have very little custom software or whose software is generally in the form of plugins rather than entire applications.
--I'm not sure what planet you're on because you seem to be trying to write an anti-science diatribe and yet much of what you say is no different from the view of a scientist.
--But when people ask why there is more matter than anti-matter and the respose is that anti-matter decays faster it's practically a circular answer like explaining that morphine works because it contains soporific agents. Almost everyone's immediate question is "Well why does it decay faster?" and to that there is as yet no reasonable answer. This is an interesting result for physicists but it really does nothing to answer the deep questions posed by either the Slashdot article or the BBC article.
--